News feminist philosophers can use

Small Breasts Banned in Porn January 31, 2010

to protect the kids. Really. Because apparently women with small breasts look like kids, and so porn depicting them encourages paedophilia. So Australia has banned A-cups in porn. As well as female ejaculation. And no, that’s not about protecting the kids. That’s because it’s “abhorrent”.

I just don’t know where to begin. But it is fascinating to see how an anti-paedophilia campaign turns into a stigmatization of small breasts. (I’m also wondering if they insist on women with body hair. Because body hair’s actually something kids don’t have but normal women do. Bet they’re not insisting on hairy women in the porn flicks.)

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8 Responses to “Small Breasts Banned in Porn”

I’m not sure this is really true. Crikey isn’t the most reliable source in the world, but on Australian politics I trust it a little more than Boing Boing. (Especially since the Boing Boing story mostly consists of press releases from partisans.)

The underlying idea here seems to basically be a good one. There’s a good reason to ban porn involving minors, and there are plenty of reasons to ban porn involving actors who look like minors. One reason is that it’s very hard to be sure they aren’t in fact minors; it’s easy to misrepresent a person’s age in an official-looking way. Another reason is that encourages abhorrent behaviour. If the censorship board is really doing this on a case-by-case basis, and not saying in general “women with small breasts look like children”, that sounds like they’re basically doing the right thing.

BW, I think the comments on the article you linked to make it look much more complicated. It looks to me as though the basic story gets something like vindicated, though I haven’t read through all of it. Interestingly, a number of the protagonists get involved.

That said, we need to recognize that it’s so easy to get caught up in a viral internet event, and your warning, the second recent one we’ve gotten, should be welcome.

Hi JJ – I agree the comments do provide some interesting pushback in defence of the original story. But I was a little suspicious of the people writing there. As you say, they were the original protagonists. That is, in some cases they were people whose job it is to lobby for the pornography industry. I’m more than a little suspicious of them! And there was quite a lot being made of the fact that the Classification Board hadn’t denied various claims, which seemed like a thin reed to base stuff on. Gov’t bodies are really slow – that they haven’t denied something is as likely as not due to red tape.

That’s not to say the original story was wrong; indeed there clearly is a policy of banning pornography that involves people who look under-18, whether they are or not. But that’s a long way from a ban on all pornography involving A-cups.